[quote=livinincali][quote=CA renter] Most of the public employees that I know (and I know quite a few of them from multiple public agencies) have been taking pay and benefit cuts for YEARS. So, where are you getting the information that the **compensation per employee** is rising faster than population growth/productivity/inflation? And I want to see data that goes back decades, well before 2000, for the reasons stated in my post above (no cherry picking the top of the stock market when public employers were paying little to NOTHING toward their employees pension costs because the funds were OVER-funded).
[/quote]
So I went to the cities budget page to see if I could find the data. I did find it but it doesn’t go back decades. I went ahead and looked at environmental services as it’s a pretty large piece of the city and an area where we like to think privitazation and charging for trash pick up are solutions. So here’s what I found.
In 2003 the further the data goes back Environment services had 510.37 positions with a total personal budget of 32,827,675 or $64,321/employee. In 2013 that budget is 414 employees with a total personal budget of 38,178,388 or about $92,218/employee. That looks pretty close to an average of about 50% more per employee in the last 10 years. Pretty much lines up with exactly as I said. Now I’ll ask you to provide specific data about why I’m wrong. Something more than your stories about people you know. Here is a link to the data I used.
There is a lot more involved there than “picking up trash.” I am not familiar with the Environmental Services Departments in San Diego City, nor with changes they might have made over these years, so it’s possible that these employees are costing more per person today than they were in 2003. For all we know, they’ve eliminated some lower-paying positions and added higher-paying ones; or, the 2003 number might have had a much lower pension contribution rate than in 2013 because there was a lag in increasing the pension contributions after the “pension holiday” during the stock market bubble, etc. Your information is not position-specific, so it’s difficult to tell what happened.
It would be easier to see pay/benefit charts over the years to show us the real changes. I have one here for LAUSD (just found one pay chart from the late 90s which we can compare with the most recent one online), and will post the info when I get more time. It should be a good indicator for most other local positions since (I believe) it’s the largest local govt employer in the state.
This is your quote:
[quote=livinincali]There’s going to be some winners and a lot of losers, but the math dictates the exponential growth in public sector salaries and benefits is pretty much at it’s end. In the future public sector salaries and benefits will have to grow slower than the economy or significant productivity improvements will have to be made.[/quote]
Presumably, you would have had some kind of data or proof that public sector salaries and benefits have had “exponential growth.” Just the same as your quote in this thread that “90% of public budgets are going to public employees,” you’re just making this stuff up.
At least I have solid knowledge about the compensation packages for public employees at both state and local levels. They have been making concessions in pay and benefits for YEARS — and that’s nominal decreases. When you take their compensation over time and compare it to the increases in the cost of housing, energy, medical care, etc. you’ll see that they have been falling behind for a long, long time (just like many other workers). ALL workers are the targets of the privatization movement, and they are trying to divide us so that they can take even more.
Still waiting for your proof that employee compensation has been “growing exponentially” over the decades or that 90% of state and local budgets goes to employee compensation.
